U.S. Capitol tour shows visitors the calm before the shutdown storm

The Senate rejected House amendments to a short-term spending bill Monday, moving the U.S. government closer to its first shutdown in nearly two decades.

Caption

With no agreement on a funding bill in sight, Republicans and Democrats continue to spar on Capitol Hill, while federal workers sit at home and the American public watches as an even more critical deadline on raising the federal debt limit nears.

Oct. 8, 2013 House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) talks with reporters after meeting with the House Republican caucus on the eighth day of the government shutdown. House Republican leaders pressed demands for negotiations with Senate Democrats and President Obama over bills to fund the government and raise the federal debt limit, but they would not say what they are seeking in those negotiations.Melina Mara/The Washington Post

At the start of the Capitol’s last visitor tour for the day — or maybe it was the last one for two days, or for a week — there was a 15-minute video. The aim of this video was a difficult one, even in the best of times.

It was supposed to make Americans feel proud of Congress.

“This is the core, the center, of our experiment with political freedom,” the narrator said. “Congress is where we can find our common ground.”

Or maybe not.

On Monday, as Congress drifted toward the its latest ultimate failure of compromise — a shutdown of the government — the Capitol’s last tour set off at 3:10 p.m. The hour-long trip provided a look at Washington’s central building in the last hours of a normal day. All workers were at their posts. And, for a few minutes more, there were still people who had come to feel in awe of this place. The video called it a “Temple of Liberty.”

At that point, the stage was still occupied. In theory. The House and Senate, 25-year veteran tour guide Adriane Norman told the group in midafternoon, were still in session.

“They better be in session!” said Doris McDonald, of Orcas Island, Wash., to her husband, Brent. They’d come to Washington for a seven-day tour, something from Doris’s bucket list. They were only four days in. After Monday, they feared all the monuments they’d come to see would be closed. (“We got three days left. You got any wheels?” Brent asked a reporter when the tour was over.)

Norman’s tour took them through Statuary Hall, where great compromises had been worked out in the House of Representatives. It took them to the Rotunda, past statues of Reagan and Eisenhower, and past a reporter shouting into his cellphone about the House’s latest demands. They didn’t hear him, because Capitol tourists wear little headsets that pipe in the tour guide’s voice.

Then the little group filed back down to the visitor center, where everybody had to give back their little headsets.

Only then — a floor below the glories of the past — did Norman get a question about the troubles of the present.

“So, I heard that the bill came back out of the Senate?” asked Vicki Merson, 65, who works in insurance in Westminster, Calif.

“It did,” Norman said.

“Then they better get their little patooties in gear! Today is the day!” Merson said.

It was a subject that meant a lot to Norman, the tour guide. If lawmakers couldn’t agree, she wouldn’t be at work on Tuesday. The Capitol would close to visitors, and tours would cease.

“We realize that this is part of the political process,” but it is still a hardship, said Emily Milot-Lamarche, president of the local union that represents the Capitol’s guides and gift-shop workers. In true guide fashion, she was already imagining how she would add this to a tour: “This is a great teaching moment, in American democracy, in terms of education I can see how I’m going to use this for weeks to come.”

But there is no room for personal emotions in a Capitol tour. On Monday, Norman just remarked on how lucky Merson was to be here, on this day, to see such an interesting thing while it happened.

“You know what? This is stupid politics,” Merson said afterward. “They’re playing games.” She and her group left to get visitor-gallery passes and watch the game-playing in person.

It was 4:35. Upstairs, in the Capitol, the drama was just ­beginning: Reporters were clumped outside offices, the House was preparing for a key vote. But downstairs, in the $621 million visitor center, they were shutting things down and running people off.